麻豆约拍

This August marks 50 years since Elvis Presley and the young pretenders of pop the Beatles met, 麻豆约拍 Radio 2 is marking the anniversary with , including documentaries, special features, music and a new drama, When Elvis Met the Beatles. Here scriptwriter Jeff Young talks about the new play.

I grew up with the Beatles, heard every song on its first day of release, saved up my pocket money to buythe records, went to the cinema to see the films, collected the bubble gum cards. The first time the Beatles were on TV my granddad said, "Those lads are from Liverpool and they’re going to be very famous."

I spent my childhood living in Beatle Land until it got to the point where enough was enough. I stopped listening to the Beatles – that is, I stopped listening to them by choice, because in Liverpool you can’t get away from John, Paul, George and Ringo. Having listened to their music from the very beginning - almost as if that’s just what you did in Liverpool in the 60’s – I lost interest in the Beatles in the late 60’s when I was old enough to go to record shops by myself and spend my pocket money on Tamla Motown 45’s. I’d discovered something for myself and, for me the Beatles music had lost its spark. 

I was over- saturated in Beatles music and over familiarity had tarnished the myth and made their music stale. I went from being a fan to switching the radio off whenever one of their songs came on. I wanted the electrifying Four Tops, Stevie Wonder, The Temptations; this music was so much more exhilarating than ‘Hey Jude’ and ‘Let it Be’.

When I was asked to work on the Beatles meet Elvis project at first I didn’t get it. I knew a little about the meeting but it didn’t strike me as an event with much dramatic content. But as I began researching the story the strangeness of the meeting and the psychological dimensions made it more and more attractive. Elvis was ingesting a frightening cocktail of prescription drugs and seeing visions of angels. About this time he saw Joseph Stalin’s face in the sky and was relieved when Stalin’s face turned into God’s. John Lennon was already disillusioned with Beatle Mania and cynical about the circus they were trapped in. They were holed up in Zsa Zsa Gabor’s mansion, hiding from screaming fans that loved them so much they wanted to rip them to pieces. Brian Epstein was a troubled man, drinking heavily, living a secret life as a gay man and wounded by Lennon’s cruelty. Colonel Tom Parker was a vulgar philistine with a background in carnival sideshows. John and George particularly were experimenting with drugs. All of this and more, set against a backdrop of corrupt American politics and the disastrous war in Vietnam made for a strange and compelling narrative.

The programme that emerged from all of this is a kind of fake documentary. To write it I first went back to the Beatles records and tried to remember what they meant to me when I was young and the songs were first released. I watched the Beatles films again and got their voices into my head; it was important to write in their voices, get the banter right and I found the best way to do this was to act out the lines, speaking in a Lennon or Ringo voice, trying to get the wise cracking tone. Footage of their American tour, of screaming girls and press conferences gave me an insight into the experience they were having. News footage, hysteria, surging crowds…and in the middle of it four lads from Liverpool and their urbane chaperone Brian, the centre of the whirlwind. We listened to archive radio broadcasts and drew on their sense of urgency and excitement – and I watched too many Elvis films, but even they were useful because they gave me a sense of how far apart the Beatles and Elvis were culturally, stylistically and in terms of general cool. By immersing myself in these various materials I could get as close as possible to the voice of the Beatles and the tone of their American experience. The drama is as much about atmosphere as action or emotion.

The Beatles were so young; they were bewildered and overwhelmed by their rapid rise to fame. They were more than just a pop group – they were a phenomenon and neither they nor Epstein quite knew how that had happened.

We wanted to create a sense of this bewilderment and strangeness and we wanted to create a sense of fear and boredom and also wide eyed exploration of this strange new world. These were kids with the eyes of the world upon them and – the boyfriends of those screaming girls - some very angry young men taking pot shots at the aeroplane the Beatles flew to gigs in. The actors in the piece rose to this with enthusiasm. Between takes they messed around and bantered – The Beatles we see in the films are playing versions of themselves, with all their mad cap surrealism and Goons inspired humour – and we hopefully managed to get a sense of this laddishness, this ‘fabness’ across. The way the Beatles coped with the madness was to enter into the madness. Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers were as influential on the Beatles as Elvis Presley. You get a sense of this in the drama – one minute the lads are playing cowboys and Indians, the next minute Lennon is doing his best Doctor Strangelove impression, the next they’re strapping on guitars and howling like Hound Dogs.

The drama is then a hybrid of fly on the wall documentary and a biopic in sound. We eavesdrop on private conversations held behind closed doors; we squeeze into the limousine with the Beatles and get a sense of what they might have been feeling as they drove through Beverley Hills on their way to meet the King. Some of this is documented and actually happened; some of it is invented. We will never really know what Brian and the Colonel talked about in private but we can piece together some possibilities from news reports and biographies. Rather than narration we have Brian recording his thoughts on a reel to reel tape machine. These are the ‘Lost Tapes’. I tried to imagine what Brian might have confided to a tape recorder, late at night, lonely, slightly inebriated, bewildered, wounded. For me Brian emerges as the hero of this story. I came to have enormous respect for him and I hope at least a sense of this remarkable, complex man comes across in the play.

Elvis Presley’s life was an American Tragedy and the seeds of it are sown here, in this meeting between the King and the pretenders to the throne. Two years later Brian Epstein would be dead and in a few years time the Beatles dream would be over.

In writing this piece I went back to those old Beatles records and I became a Beatles fan, all over again.

Jeff Young is a playwright and author of When Elvis met the Beatles.

• will be on 麻豆约拍 Radio 2 on Monday 31 August at 7pm.